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Nikon D5000 User's Guide:
Retouch Menu

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Nikon D5000

Nikon D5000. enlarge

June 2009   Top of D5000 Users Guide    D5000 Review    More Nikon Reviews

 

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How to Get Here

Select the Retouch Menu by pressing MENU, moving to the left and then up or down to select the brush icon second from the bottom. You'll then see RETOUCH MENU on the top of the color LCD.

You also can hit OK while an image is playing.

 

What it Sets

This is a silly menu that lets you twiddle with images you've already shot. The originals are unaltered. The D5000 creates new versions of the images and saves them.

 

Concatenation

The D5000 is sneaky enough to know if a file was created with these trick modes, and often won't let you apply the same filter twice. You can concatenate different filters.

If your original image is an NEF or TIFF, it will be saved as a FINE LARGE JPG. Otherwise, it's saved the same way as the original image.

 

Firmware Defect

The new images are saved with a file number one more than the most recent image. The EXIF create time is unaltered, so you'll have to sort images by "create time" if you can.

This defect means that the file numbers of the newly created versions are scrambled from the originals. If you're playing with the most recent image, the file numbers are close, but if you're playing with an earlier file, its file number will be unrelated to the original.

For instance, if you make an edited version of DCS_0123.jpg, the new file might be called CSC_5837.jpg, with no relation either by letters or by numbers. Good luck!

The correct way to do this is to retain the same file name and append -edit, -edit1, -edit2, etc. If Nikon did the correctly, an edited version would be named something like DSC_0123-edit.jpg.

Here's what each does.

 


 

D-Lighting        top

This lightens dark shadows. It doesn't touch highlights.

You have three levels of lightening: Low, Normal, and High.

If you set ADR to AUTO for shooting as I do, you shouldn't need this. Remember: shadows are supposed to be dark.

 


 

Red-Eye Correction        top

This attempts to rectify flash-induced red eyes.

This filter is sneaky enough to know if you used flash or not to make the image, and won't let you use this filter if you didn't use flash.

I've never had a problem with red-eye with my D5000, so all the better. When I was able to cause red-eye, this filter only corrected half of the eyes!

 


 

Trim        top

This creates cropped versions of images.

No pixels are moved or changed in size.

Trim removes unwanted pixels from the sides of an image and saves a smaller image.

 


 

Monochrome        top

This creates black-and-white images.

It has three modes:

 

Black-and-White

 

Sepia (Brown-and-white)

 

Cyanotype (Blue-and-White)

 

Have fun!

 


 

Filter Effects        top

This creates images that attempt to simulate what might have happened if you had used a real filter in the first place. You've got your choice of:

 

Skylight

Very slightly pinker.

 

Warm Filter

Slightly warmer (more orange).

The Warm filter usually improves casual images. You can forget the skylight filter.

 

Red, Green or Blue intensifier

Self explanatory.

 

Cross screen

This draws little sunstars.

It really works, but sadly only offers 4, 6 or 8-pointed stars, not Nikon's usually 14-pointed ones you get from their 7-bladed diaphragms.

 

Soft

Self explanatory.

 


 

Color Balance       top

This one's slick. It calls up a better control panel than Photoshop's color balance tool, which dates from the 1980s.

Nikon's tool reminds me of what we have on million-dollar Hollywood telecine color correction machines used to color correct motion pictures.

The Nikon D5000 shows three histograms (reminiscent of Tektronix' WFM700 waveform monitors) and the D5000's Up/Down/Left/Right key becomes the color correction track ball. Click it left and right to alter blue-red, and up down for magenta - green.

If you have something neutral, watch the waveforms, oops, histograms, until they are about equal. Left - right on the Up/Down/Left/Right key slides the red and blue in opposite directions, and green - magenta slides the red and blue equally left or right. The green stays put.

This allows you to correct in any color, and if you want to warm an image (that I do most often in Photoshop), allows more flexibility than the fixed Warm filter above.

 


 

Small Picture        top

This one lets you make a smaller image, for email or web posting, for instance.

 


 

Image Overlay        top

This one's silly, but you can drop two images on top of each other to create a final composite.

It only works with source images in NEF.

 


 

NEF (RAW) Processing        top

This lets you make and save a JPG from any raw file.

It's helpful if you only shot in raw.

 


 

Quick Retouch        top

This lets you create and save a copy with wilder colors. YES!

 


 

Straighten       top

This lets you fix crooked horizons, up to ±5º.

 


 

Distortion Control        top

This allows creating a new copy of an image with very rudimentary first-order distortion correction. This mode cannot correct the more complex distortion of may wider lenses.

It doesn't work very precisely, and you only can see what you're doing by looking at an unzoomed image on the 2.7 " screen.

I do these corrections in Photoshop's Lens Distortion Filter, or in DxO, but either of those software packages can cost almost as much as a D5000.

Your best bet is to set Auto distortion control ON as you shoot, not fiddle with it in-camera afterwards.

 


 

Fisheye        top

All this does is bloat the center of a rectangular image.

It doesn't wrap it into a circle, and it certainly doesn't expand your angle of view.

Photoshop's Spherize command is much better, but Photoshop costs almost as much as a D5000.

 


 

Color Outline        top

This is a silly high-pass filter that tries to turn an image into a line drawing.

Good luck!

 


 

Perspective Control        top

This helps straighten images that were shot looking up or down, or were out of alignment left or right.

I prefer Photoshop's Lens Distortion Filter, but this one's free!

 


 

Stop-motion movie        top

This takes the still frames you select and turns them into an AVI time-lapse movie clip.

Used with the intervalometer, you can make some very slick movies this way.

 


PLUG

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Thanks for reading!

Ken


Back to Top of D5000 User's Guide or Top of Nikon D5000 Review

KNOBS and BUTTONS

     FRONT

     TOP PANEL

     BACK

MENUS

     PLAYBACK   

     SHOOTING MENU

     CUSTOM SETTING MENU

          a Autofocus

          b Exposure

          c Timers/AE Lock

          d Shooting/display

          e Bracketing/flash

          f Controls

     SET UP MENU

     RETOUCH MENU

     RECENT ITEMS (or MY MENU) MENU < < NEXT

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